Rescued from Myanmar cyber scam compound, 3 men ‘regrouped to run fraud racket in India’

Speaking to The Indian Express, Pimpri Chinchwad police commissioner Vinoy Kumar Choubey, who closely monitored the probe, said: “Our investigation shows how organised cyber fraud networks are on one hand exploiting a large number of Indian youth but on the other hand also creating a pool of trained operatives who can later replicate such criminal models within the country.”

The trail that led to the trio, and their unusual story, began at the Cyber Crime police station of Pimpri Chinchwad, where investigators were looking into an elaborate share trading con in which a young businessman and his parents were defrauded of Rs 2.1 crore in the first week of February.

The victims told police they were scammed by two men posing as stock market experts — “Sarath Kumar Malik” and “Shalini Kulkarni” — through a phoney share trading application. Investigators found that a chunk of the siphoned money had gone to the account of a private company from Navi Mumbai.

Towards the end of March, they tracked down and arrested the company’s promoter Sushil Bhagwan Juwatkar (42), a real estate businessman from Nerul West in Navi Mumbai. Police also arrested two more suspects who were part of the operation: Pankaj Raj Kapur (38) from Jalandhar, and Nischal Tankbir Bareyali (27) from Darjeeling, both of whom had moved to Nerul to work with Juwatkar.

“We found that the suspects were operating from a space in Nerul linked to a company registered by Juwatkar. Searches at the premises revealed an elaborate cyber crime operation. We recovered complete kits — passbooks, cheque books, debit cards and linked SIMs — of nearly two dozen bank accounts used as mule accounts, along with half a dozen mobile phones, Point of Sale machines and 12 seals,” the officer said.

“Examination of these accounts showed they had been used in at least 120 offences across the country and had seen transactions ranging from Rs 2-18 crore,” the officer said.

But the real twist was yet to come.

The investigation revealed that the trio had learned the tricks of the trade after falling prey to flashy social media advertisements promising lucrative jobs in Bangkok. After landing in Thailand, they were allegedly taken to the notorious KK Park cyber scam compound in Myanmar’s Myawaddy region, along the Myanmar-Thailand border. “The compound is infamous for organised cyber crime operations that exploit thousands of trafficked youths lured with fake overseas job offers,” the officer said.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has described these scam centres as a vast criminal ecosystem built on human trafficking and forced online fraud. In reports released since 2023, the UN estimated that hundreds of thousands of people may be trapped in such compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, where they are allegedly forced to run investment, cryptocurrency and romance scams under threats, torture and physical abuse.

“We found out that the three had gone to Bangkok and then to Myanmar in August 2025. At KK Park, they were forced into executing cyber scams on Indian citizens, including share trading frauds, task frauds, romance frauds and digital arrest frauds. While they worked under duress at these massive call centres in the compound, they drew a small pay for their work. It was during this stay that the trio connected with each other and exchanged numbers,” the officer said.

According to investigators, the trio returned to India after an extensive joint action by authorities in Myanmar and outside, during which thousands of men and women were rescued and repatriated across December and January.

There was more to come.

“After returning to India, the trio regrouped in Nerul and started executing online scams in collaboration with some suspects linked to the racket run from KK Park. They had plans to set up an elaborate cyber crime operation. In the searches conducted as part of the probe, we found that the suspects had purchased domain names to create the facade of legitimate businesses for their cyber crime operations. They also had plans to run their operation from a farmhouse near Mumbai, possibly in the Karjat area, for which they had shortlisted some options. They had even started working on the layout of the space they were about to purchase from the proceeds of crime when we caught them,” said another officer.